Lifebirds #247-252 – Big Easy Birding

Joann and I arrived in New Orleans on a Sunday afternoon. Shortly after checking into our hotel just across Canal Street from the French Quarter, we walked two or three blocks to the river. There we saw and heard (boy did we hear!) our lifer Laughing Gull and about four dozen of its closest friends.
The next day, after Joann attended meetings at her American Chemical Society conference, we took a streetcar to Audubon Park. Its name was hopeful at least. We had limited time there and failed to find the spectacular heronry we did on the following day. But we did all right with the time we had.

Our first lifer at the park was a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, the clown of the heron family. What a fun bird! I managed to keep my camera pointed towards it and not the woman with the full-body dragon tattoo–possibly a student at the nearby Tulane University–sunbathing nearby. Wish I had managed to get a better picture of the bird and at least one of the woman.Next, we saw a Carolina Chickadee flying in and out of a nest box near a golf course green. These chickadees can only be distinguished from our backyard chickadee (the Black-capped Chickadee) by voice and/or range. We used range–I don’t remember it vocalizing. I did manage to get one picture of it as it entered its nest box. Not a prize-winning photo, surely, but good enough for me to use here (it is my blog, after all, and if you want to see a better photo of this species click through this page’s photo album).
While we were looking at the chickadee, we heard and saw our first Fish Crows. These birds are smaller than our familiar American Crows. But size is difficult to judge when a bird is sitting at the top of trees or flying. Not a problem in this case though, as the high-pitched, nasally voice of the Fish Crow is unmistakable.

We saw our first Cattle Egrets and White Ibises on the golf course. The ibises are very striking birds. In Louisiana (and years later in Florida) we realized how common they are down south. Trash birds there, almost, though we could never see them that way.